02 September 2010

Poster Venn


If you’ve presented or viewed posters, you’ve probably noticed there’s a lot of stuff on them that don’t really matter.

We put them on because we want to mimic scientific papers. References are a great example. Several of my colleagues are of the opinion that any academic work without a reference list is unacceptable. Listening to some, you’d think that such a poster would cause the conference hall to explode and leave every molecule in your body streaming away from the center of the blast at near the speed of light.

So we cave. We stick on a terminal reference list in Harvard format that nobody looks at. It might be shorter than the one in the published paper, but few dare to cut it entirely.

Graphic inspired by xkcd.

Related posts

References on posters
Containment

2 comments:

Becca said...

I refuse to put references on my poster. It's a bleeping poster!! Nobody reads the intro/background anyway. I'd take issue, though, with "email address" being something people don't want--I always end up with a list of people who want to be emailed the pdf or to chat, etc. So every year I keep meaning to put my email address on the poster...but I forget :/

Bronwyn said...

I don't put them on if I can help it. If the researcher insists, I make sure they're in the format . No more than three of them, in small type, at the bottom.